Monica Starkman, MD, MS
psychiatrist, Psychology Today columnist, and author of End of Miracles
Monica Starkman is a psychiatrist-novelist-author. As a psychiatrist, she is professor emerita, active status, at the University of Michigan Department of Psychiatry and its Depression Center. Her clinical specialty has been consultations to physicians and their patients in the general medical hospital. Her NIH-funded research has been on the brain effects of hormones. As a novelist, she wrote The End of Miracles, an international best-seller that is a gripping, twisting story of a woman with a frustrated obsession to have a child. The novel is currently optioned by a producer and being developed into a film. She has her own blog/column in PsychologyToday (it is titled On Call), and she writes regularly there.
Me: What suggestions do you have for finding the headspace to enjoy the holidays during a pandemic?
Dr. Starkman: We all have to accept that the holidays will not be the same as they usually are. At the same time, we can look for ways in which the new normal may have some benefits. For example, using Zoom you can have more family than usual be present at your holiday table or celebration. Or you can share recipes with family and friends with whom you usually gather in person, so everyone can make them in their home to enjoy together with you when the date comes.
Me: 2020 has not been kind to many. What suggestion(s) do you have for those experiencing trauma?
Dr. Starkman:
- Recognize it is normal to have anticipatory anxiety that you or your loved ones will get sick with the virus.
- Allow yourself 15 minutes a day for thinking about and worrying about the virus. When this worry time is over, continue the rest of your day and pay less attention to worries. If such thoughts do occur, let them pass through your mind, and at the same time remind yourself that tomorrow you will have another opportunity devoted completely to worrying.
- Social support is so important. Reconnect with others via mail, invite others to little Zoom coffee or wine meetings, check out with your religious community is offering via the internet, and so on.
- Find ways to experience pleasure in your day. Find on the internet or your CD’s music you enjoy, for example. Dance to music in your living room. These are some examples of ways to make sure the pleasure centers of your brain get stimulated.
Me: What is the relationship between mental health and reading?
Dr. Starkman: As young children, one important way we learn about the world and other people is by having stories read to us. As adults, this learning continues with every book we read.
With the pandemic, our world is constricted and our daily connection to others is sharply reduced. So reading is even more important as a way to be ‘in touch with’, and keep learning about, other people. Reading memoirs lets others communicate with us and tell us about themselves. Reading fiction is a way to expand our limited social world into a different world constructed for us by the novelist. The book’s characters are new people for us to meet. We vicariously enter their environment; we witness closely their relationships, their deepest feelings, their challenges, and the solutions they find. Through them, we keep participating in what it means to be a human being who lives in a social world with connections to others.
Me: What 3 books would you recommend to someone struggling with depression or anxiety?
Dr. Starkman:
- Feeling Good, by David Burns. It is a self-help manual of cognitive therapy.
- A book that gave you great pleasure when you first read it. Reread it to experience again a sense of pleasure.
- Ordinary People by Judith Guest (or, if I may, The End of Miracles by Monica Starkman), both of which show how someone with serious mental illness can emerge again into the light.
Me: How does your background in psychiatry influence your writing?
Dr. Starkman: As I write characters, I strive to understand them as deeply as I have with my patients. I also want to show psychiatric patients, psychiatrists, and psychiatric treatment much more realistically than is usually shown in books and films.
To learn more about Dr. Starkman’s novel The End of Miracles, check out this post, Recommended Books to Celebrate Mother’s Day.